Ma Pettengill eBook

So the woman polished her nose glasses and read a
double sheet of long up-and-down calligraphy—­that
is, she read until she exploded in triumphant retort:

“Ha! There now! Don’t I know
a thing or two? Listen: ’Oswald is
so enraptured with the mite; you would never guess
what he calls it—­“My little flower
with bones and a voice!"’ Now! Don’t
tell me I didn’t have Oswald’s number.
I knew he wouldn’t be satisfied to call it a
baby; he’d be bound to name it something animal,
vegetable, or mineral. Ain’t it the truth?
‘Little flower with bones and a voice!’
What do you know about that? That’s a scientist
trying to be poetic.

“And here—­get this: She says
that one hour after the thing was born the happy father
was caught by the doctor and nurse seeing if it could
hold its own weight up on a broomstick, like a monkey.
She says he was acutely distressed when these authorities
deprived him of the custody of his child. Wouldn’t
that fade you? Trying to see if a baby one hour
old could chin itself! Quite all you would wish
to know about Oswald.”

I hastily said no; it was not nearly all I wanted
to know about Oswald. I wanted to know much more.
Almost any one would. The lady once more studied
the hairy face with its bone-rimmed glasses.

“Shucks!” said she. “He don’t
look near as proud in this as he does in that one
he sent me himself—­here, where is that thing?”

From the far end of the big table she brought under
the lamp a basket of Indian weave and excavated from
its trove of playing cards, tobacco sacks, cigarette
papers, letters, and odd photographs another snapshot
of Oswald. It was a far different scene.
Here Oswald stood erect beside the mounted skeleton
of some prehistoric giant reptile that dwarfed yet
left him somehow in kingly triumph.

“There now!” observed the lady. “Don’t
he look a heap more egregious by that mess of bones
than he does by his own flesh and blood? Talk
about pride!”

And I saw that it was so. Here Oswald looked
the whole world in the face, proud indeed! One
hand rested upon the beast’s kneecap in a proprietary
caress. Oswald looked too insufferably complacent.
It was the look to be forgiven a man only when he
wears it in the presence of his first-born. If
snapshots tell anything at all, these told that Oswald
was the father of a mammoth sauropod and had merely
dug up the baby in a fossil bed somewhere.

“That’s where the man’s heart really
lies,” said his stern critic, “even if
he does drivel about his little flower with bones and
a voice! Probably by now he’s wishing the
voice had been left out of his little flower.”
Impressively she planted a rigid forefinger on the
print of the mounted skeleton.

“That there,” she glibly rattled off,
“is the organic remains of a three-toed woolly
bronsolumphicus of the carboniferous limestone, or
Upper Silurian trilobite period. I believe I have
the name correct. It was dug up out of a dry
lake in Wyoming that years ago got to be mere loblolly,
so that this unfortunate critter bogged down in it.
The poor thing passed on about six million or four
hundred million years ago—­somewhere along
there. Oswald and his new father-in-law dug it
from its quiet resting place in the old cemetery.
Such is their thrilling work in life.